Australia's securities regulators, and ANZ and Merrill Lynch, have got a lot to answer for over the collapse of Opes Prime Stockbroking, and now Lift Capital, which went broke on Friday.

With Opes about 1200 people are going to lose a lot of money, including some traumatic personal tragedies. Lift Capital has more clients, about 1600, but it's not clear yet how much they'll lose: maybe nothing.

Let's not get bogged down in the legal technicalities of the contracts these firms used. The simple fact is that there were just two suppliers of money here: ANZ and Merrill Lynch for Opes and Merrill Lynch alone for Lift.